Intimate relationships between women
in their thirties (usually teachers) and thirteen-year-old
boys may not be commonplace, but we've read enough about
them to not flinch every time Fox-TV broadcasts a new
scandal. Director William Sten Olsson's An American
Affair tells the story of several affairs, affairs
of both the heart and of politics. But the most interesting
affair in the film is the one between a lonely but precocious
thirteen-year-old boy and a woman who could be a clone
of Marilyn Monroe (Gretchen Mol).

American Affair is set in Washington
D.C. in 1963, just after the Bay of Pigs debacle. The
story is seen through the voyeuristic eyes of a young
man (our thirteen year old) who peers through his binoculars
at a naked woman in the house across the street. He watches
her as she smokes a cigarette, then casually noticing
her onlooker, slowly pulls down the shade. What's particularly
strange about the neighbor's nonchalant behavior is that
Catherine Caswell (Gretchen Mol) is a "confidante"
of President Kennedy. One would expect someone with access
to the White House to be a more private person.

Catherine employs the young man, Adam
Stafford (Cameron Bright of Juno, Running
Scared and Birth), as her gardener. Adam
supposedly takes the job because he wants to make some
money to use to for a school trip to to Europe. Catherine
asks her new gardener to tear down everything in her home's
landscaped terrain. This tear down desire is at least
faintly plausible since Catherine is an abstract painter
when she's not busy with her former husband, CIA operative
Graham Caswell (Mark Pellegrino), Lucian Carver (James
Carver), or the president. "Form is dead," Catherine
states, and this opinion is wholeheartedly adopted up
by the boy.

Needless to say Adam's parents, Mike (Noah Wyle) and Adrienne
Stafford (Perrey Reeves) want their son to stay away from
"that" woman. But staying away from that woman
is the last thing on Adam's mind, especially since he
is unhappy at his Catholic school where he is picked on
by bullies. Adam, has his eyes not only on the beautiful
Catherine but also on the spooky goings-on between Catherine,
the ex-husband who wants her back and the mysterious CIA
operative who is after the diary that Catherine has been
keeping ever since she was in the third grade.

The final third of the film, the conspiratorial
segment, lacks originality and credibility, since Catherine
could have simply express-mailed her diary to the President
rather, than risk its falling into the wrong hands.

Alex Metcalf wrote the script for the
film, which was helmed by a first time director, the Swedish-born
Willaim Sten Olsson. (Olsson was formerly a guitar player
in a Swedish rock band.) Some archival film footage is
used including clips from Kennedy's "ice bin ein
Berliner" speech in Germany's capital, his fateful
November trip to Dallas and Walter Cronkite's announcing
the president's death on TV

Two movies opening this Friday seem
torn from today's headlines in that they both deal with
banks as the bad guys. The International, a testosterone-filled
action pic, finds the marmoreal institutions guilty of
bad stuff which leads to murders rather than just the
economic plundering that some of them are guilty of today.
Confessions of a Shopaholic, an all-too-familiar
piffle of a chick-flick, indirectly indicts banks for
extending too much credit to people who cannot afford
it. OK, that's stretching the point: P.J. Hogan, whose
previous entries included two movies about marriage, is
hardly catering to the political junkies in America with
Shopaholic. Under the guise of wagging a finger
at women who shop too much, P.J. Hogan, using Tracey Jackson
and Tim Firth's screenplay adapted from Sophie Kinsella's
novel, may be coaxing people in the audience into running
to the top clothing stores in New York. It's all in good
fun, with one exception: aside from a few creative scenes,
the most ingenious being two in which store mannequins
try to entice the principal character into buying but
who later, ironically applaud her for passing them by,
Confessions of a Shopaholic has a few laughs,
but is bogged down by frantic editing and, worst of all,
by characters so broadly conceived as to be frightening.
And oh, as for the confessions of the title, they come
late into the story and stand out as the one oasis of
conversation in a desert of unrelenting kitsch.

Despite the economic times we're now
in, the well-heeled, the less-anxious, those with good
steady jobs, will still patronize the finest stores. The
Ladies-Who-Lunch are one category—women who spend
their days with friends lunching and shopping in New York's
boutiques, though we're reluctant to call them shopaholics.

Shopaholism might be defined as an addiction to spending
money that one does not have, which is the case with the
film's main character, Rebecca Bloomwood, a sexy, funny,
vivacious bundle of energy played by the thirty-three-year
old Scottish actress, Isla Fisher. Rebecca is a character
who could have come to us from a chapter of Sex and
the City. Rebecca is a journalist with $16,000 and
change in debts, charged to twelve bank cards. She is
Interviewed by Luke Brandon (Hugh Dancy) who is in charge
of a financial magazine. Rebecca scores big on the interview,
despite knowing nothing about derivatives or short selling.
Her success in the interview is because Luke—accustomed
to a mousy secretary (Julie Haggerty)--is taken in by
Rebecca's woman's flaming red hair and kinetic energy.
On probation for three weeks, Rebecca writes a column
explaining high finance to the woman-in-the-street, a
piece that has mass appeal and wins her a steady job,
ultimately even a TV interview. As she is scouted by Alette
Naylor, the publisher of an elite journal (Kristen Scott
Thomas ) and badgered to give up her impecunious ways
by her best friend Suze (Krysten Ritter), the audience
is ten minutes ahead of the movie all the way.

Isla Fisher is a charmer, all right, and despite her hyperactivity
is one of the least caricatured images. John Goodman and
Joan Cusack as her parents, Julie Haggerty as the administrative
assistant, and especially Krysten Ritter as about-to-be-married
best pal, are portrayed in such outrageous parody that
even in a feel-good comedy, they take away most shreds
of audience credibility. This is not to take away from
the inventiveness of costume designer Patricia Field,
whose creations are reminiscent of The Devil Wears
Prada and Sex and the City, the Movie.
Jo Willems's photography finds such beauty in New York's
upscale clothiers that credit cards are likely to come
out, an outcome that would be just ducky for New York's
economy.

Take a look at the poster that's used
for marketing this movie, then watch the models walk seductively
down the runway at a Bryant Park, New York spring 2007
fashion show. Would you agree with me when I say, "Who
wears this stuff?" I'm sure there are women out there
who would be content with a few pairs of sensible shoes
(which most will not wear because they associate anything
without heels to be for the elderly only), and maybe a
couple of pairs of jeans. But the fashion industry is
with us, it's part of what makes New York the world's
most exciting city, and even if most of us have never
seen anyone in these fashion show duds, for some there's
nothing that succeeds like excess.

Really, though, Eleven Minutes
(which is the time it takes for a bevy of male and female
models to perambulate on a platform in front of buyers
and the press) is not about clothing. The film is all
about Jay McCarroll, who some people virtually worship
as a charismatic guy who does not fear to show his vulnerabilities.
Jay was the winner of the first season of TV's Project
Runway. Eleven Minutes follows Jay as he attempts
to produce a show at Bryant Park even though he is without
funds. (McCarrol does receive a sponsorship from the Humane
Society because he eschews using fur and leather in his
clothing line.)

With Jay in every frame, chatting away
to his unpaid help, Eleven Minutes puts us into
the world of New York fashion, showing us how it takes
eight months of work from a group of people to prepare
for eleven minutes on the catwalk. And that is eight months
of work without ever knowing whether they'll be able to
sell what they're creating. Not everyone would necessarily
agree with Jay's vision, which is to sketch potential
creation after creation for overweight models and albinos.
Jay does compromise his ideals (the overweight models
and albinos), in a nod to the tastes of the real world.

McCarroll himself may be considered
a cuddly teddy-bear by those who appreciate his down-home,
bulky appearance, an appearance which would never allow
him to walk down his own runway as anything other than
the designer who appears for a few minutes at the end
of the show. To me, however, he gives his documentary
the feel of a vanity production. When McCarroll states
that he'd just as soon open an ice cream establishment
with his boyfriend and a dog, I say, sure, why not—at
least then he'd be making a product with genuine, natural
appeal rather than the sorts of garments that in my lifetime
I've never seen anyone wear. When McCarroll states that
some of his creations are inspired by vaginal discharge,
he lost any semblance of normality for this reviewer.

Michael Seldith and Rob Tate, who direct
this documentary, give McCarroll the opportunity to let
it all hang out, but by allowing this "hanging out"
rather than editing out some of the promiscuous vulgarity
of both McCarroll's tongue and dare-one-say the wardrobe
he creates for who-knows-who, they've made Eleven
Minutes a film that should have lasted no more than
its title.

An hour into the new indie gem, Explicit
Ills, Rosario Dawson enters the film’s mosaic-like
frame and immediately captivates the audience. The sequence
of events that bring her into the story and the direction
the movie takes once she is introduced into the narrative,
are painful, honest and shocking.

Dawson delivers a powerful yet simple
portrait of a mother who loves her son in a world where
love doesn’t seem to matter as much as wealth, power
and red tape. It’s a fierce and poignant performance
made all the richer by the fact that by the time she appears
we have already fallen in love with little Babo, played
by the infectiously endearing and disarming Francisco
Burgos.

Burgos’ performance is not of
the in-your-face-love-me-now school that so many Hollywood
child actors are about. This boy is immediately beloved
because his sweetness comes from an organic, no-bullshit
place.

And so much of Explicit Ills
is no bullshit.

Writer/Director Mark Webber weaves an
always fascinating, occasionally frustrating tapestry
about a group of people who happen to live in the same
Philadelphia neighborhood; all trying to survive these
socio-economically challenging times.

His Altman-esque approach is commendable
and he mostly succeeds as his disjointed narrative breeds
cohesion and a type of filmic poetry.

Webber has a lot of creative fun with
the camera and the way he decided to edit the film, placing
his own original stamp on a work about social injustice
that is rarely preachy and, ultimately, affirming.

I was not impressed with the final scene
in the film as I felt there was something off about it.
Maybe it was trying too hard, maybe not hard enough. But
Explicit Ills is still quite the impressive achievement.

Watch a performance of Spanish flamenco
and follow it up with film about the Portugese musical
tradition, fado. You can do this easily enough by renting
a DVD of Carlos Saura's superbly choreographed Flamenco,
the second of the trilogy that began with Tango
and concludes with Fados.

The songs of fados deal with the feelings of the people,
particularly the melancholy that comes with lost love.

Fados could have been a deadly
dull documentary if it were a narrated explanation of
the culture followed by snippets of song. Director Saura
does not carve out a narrative form as he did with Tango
or with his early 1980s trilogy of Blood Wedding,
Carmen and El Amor Brujo. Fados
is more a concert piece than story, its strands held together
by a music form that that emerged from Portugal's poor
neighborhoods in the 1820s and has developed to include
African rhythms from Brazil as well as more conventional
European musical styles.

Director Saura does a fine job portraying
the fados tradition; he populates his film stages with
singers and dancers who perform in front of a backdrop
of film, both archival and modern. Some of the archival
film that backs up the performers, depicts the aftermath
of the revolution of April 25, 1974 when the people of
Portugal massed in the streets holding red carnations
to convince the soldiers not to resist the expulsion to
Brazil of Marcelo Caetano. Other film backgrounds were
made recently, but doctored to give the look of old Lisbon
with major attention to Amalia
Rodrigues, the Queen of Fado.

Saura employs a considerable amount
of variety in Fados, and in this endeavor, he
is helped by his able cinematographers (Jose Luis Lopez-Linares
and Eduardo Serra), his choreographers (Patrick De Bana
and Pedro Gomes), and also by his own talents as the production
designer.

One of the groups performing in the
film contributes the the jarring tones of hip-hop, with
the rappers NBC, and SP & Wilson. The segment was
entertaining enough but it broke up the narrative momentum.
In another segment, the reggae star Toni Garrido is backed
up by a bevy of women dancers in period costumes. The
high spot is a concert in Lisbon's House of Fado, presumably
a tourist attraction, in which singers and guitarists
alternate, strutting their stuff to the applause of the
patrons. Those of us not intimately familiar with fado
might conclude (as I did) that the singers sound pretty
much alike, mellifluous though their renditions might
be.

Ultimately, though, this concluding
hour and one half of Saura's trilogy (Tango,
Flamenco and Fados) is the least impressive
of the three films.

Here's something I've been wondering
about. People engaged in organized crime, people who kill,
maim, threaten, extort, poison, in short do anything to
get their hands on dollars, euros, whatever: just what
do they do with all that money? The press notes for Matteo
Garrone's Gomorrah state that the Camorra, the
syndicated crime operators whose activities are centered
in Naples and Caserta, take in 500,000 euros a day in
the drug trade. In the U.S.made films, we see criminals
enjoy clubbing, fancy restaurants and night clubs. Maybe
they give women jewelry. But from Garrone's picture, the
mostly homely, obese, uneducated creeps seem never to
leave the ghettos in which they work. Some drive nothing
fancier than a Vespa. What's the deal?

We all know that organized crime is
connected with drugs, prostitution, and shakedowns of
small and larger businesses, but did you know that they
have their fingers directly in the fashion industry—not
just connecting from, but running the production of fake
designer clothes? There's quite a bit of information contained
in this film, though even at two and one-quarter hours
it cannot possibly cover everything that is covered in
Robert Saviano's book, Gomorrah: A Person Journey
into the Violent International Empire of Naples' Organized
Crime System.

As a conveyer of information, Gomorrah
rocks. As for being riveting—not so much. Perhaps
the reason is that director Garrone, known previously
for L'Imbalsamatore (a taxidermist if ridiculed
for being short and creepy), deliberately fashions his
film as a docudrama, one which has a few illustrations
of violence such as the car bombing and machine-gunning
activities of two bored, moronic kids, but is in no way
comparable to the level of mayhem in City of God.
Aside from its documentary look, the film suffers by its
haphazard treatment of the stories of five separate families
involved in Camorra activities; their inter-relationship
becomes apparent late in the story—and even then,
the tapestry is not tightly woven. Audience members who
relish solid narratives will be disappointed by the hang-loose
trajectory. Robert Altman fans may be more sanguine.

That said, the five scripters (one handling
each family?) deal impressively with these people: before
you go into the theater, it pays to read the program.
Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) is probably loved by the
families he pays, the families of prisoners who have been
with his clan; he has more class than most of his fellow
criminals. Toto (Salvatore Abruzzese), a teenager who
wears a shirt with "England 7" on his back and
tweezes his eyebrows, is called upon to decide whether
to join the "family." Marco (Marco Macor) and
Ciro (Ciro Petrone) are the most immature and undisciplined
of the lot, generally relieving themselves of boredom
by firing machine guns into the water while wearing nothing
but underwear, in one instance, they blow up a boat. These
two can be seen on posters marketing the movie. Roberto
(Carmine Patermoster) is the other classy guy, a college
grad who by rights should have moved to Rome to begin
an honest career, but is seduced by an offer from Franco
(Toni Servillo) to dispose of toxic waste. The last story
is about Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo), a master tailor
who "sells out" to Chinese competitors in the
garment industry and must be smuggled away in the trunk
of the Chinese boss' car to avoid being killed.

The geography compares unfavorably with
the favelas treated by Fernando Meirelles in his 2002
film City of God. The film quality is sometimes
grainy, with subtitles that are difficult to read against
a white background, Garrone hones in on the big shots
and their seedy careers, much of which consists of counting
worn euro notes. The opening scenes are a hodgepodge of
exposition, then the story takes hold. We meet the above-mentioned
people carrying on their diurnal activities which include,
on the bottom of the scale, a kid who delivers groceries
but moves on to delivering goods that to some are more
satisfying than skim milk. When it comes to character
development, though, the most interesting folks include
Pasquale, the tailor who is considered a traitor because
he sneaks by night into a shop with eighty Chinese employees,
lecturing to them about the finer points of sewing knock-off
designer garments. (His talk is translated by two Chinese
who are fluent in Italian.) Pasquale is one of the few
characters in the film who has a conscience. Also showing
a human conscience is the college-educated Roberto, who
did not learn to pollute the water supply with toxic chemicals
while in the halls of academe, and who makes a decision
ultimately to walk away.

One wonders what the local carabinieri
do with their time—possibly sipping cappuccino while
the people they should be chasing are committing havoc.
They always seem to be somewhere else when the killings,
maimings, and poisonings take place. We leave the theater
with the impression that the Camorra are not replicating
just Gomorrah, but Sodom as well.

Two movies opening this Friday appear
torn from today's headlines, dealing as they do with banks
as the bad guys. Confessions of a Shopaholic,
a chick-flick, indirectly indicts banks for allowing too
much credit for people who cannot afford it. The International,
filled with far more action—a testosterone pic—finds
banks messing around with some weird stuff that gets people
killed rather than simply burdened with debt. The parallel
between the events depicted in The International
and those occurring today as banks and brokerage houses
have led the economy to global recession, gives the film
an appeal which it would not have had were it released
a year ago.

Though the story is fiction, it is based
on an actual bank, the Bank of Credit and Commercial International,
or BCCI, based in Karachi, Pakistan. The Karachi based
BCCI specialized in money laundering, arms dealing to
rebel armies, and deals made with the mafia until it went
belly-up in 1991.

Tom Tykwer, known principally for his
breathtaking Run, Lola, Run (a young woman has
just twenty minutes to take 100,000 Deutschmarks to her
boyfriend before he robs a supermarket), directs a mighty
tense Clive Owen in the role of Interpol agent Louis Salinger.
Salinger is an enraged force determined to bring down
one of the world's best-known banks, the BCCI which has
corporate offices in Luxembourg. He is paired with a New
York district attorney, Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts),
(though she might just as well have stayed out of the
story for all the import she adds). Salinger springs into
action when he witnesses the murder of a colleague just
outside the main railway station in Berlin. He investigates
a network of people who finance a arms buy for a rebel
leader in Liberia while fresh from selling missiles to
Syria and Iran and, strange-to-tell, to Israel as well.
While Tykwer is not markedly concerned with providing
psychological motivations for his characters, we do learn
that Agent Salinger takes a personal interest in his case
in order to redeem himself from a failing years back.

Though there's no particular wit or
rhythm in Eric Warren Singer's dialogue, the one gem that
stands out is uttered by Wilhelm Wexler (Armin Mueller-Stahl),
a man who had dedicated his life to furthering Communism
while a member of the East German secret police and is
involved in the bank's manipulations. He states essentially
that the difference between truth and fiction is that
fiction has to make sense. In that regard, he punctuates
the film's weakness, since so much is going on with so
many shady characters in New York, Lyon, Milan, Berlin,
Wolfsburg (Germany), and Istanbul that we in the audience
cannot be blamed for wondering whether the concluding
half-hour would get everything to gel.

The big plus is Frank Griebe's filming
on location, on sites that include New York Guggenheim
Museum, but more dramatically in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar
and Suleymaniye Mosque. Griebe employs guerrilla filmmaking
in the crowded marketplace without using extras. While
the film is largely cerebral, The International
features (along with the inevitable car chases) a fourteen-minute
shootout in the Guggenheim Museum, the interior of which
was created on a Berlin sound stage to allow Agent Salinger,
an assassin known as The Consultant (Brian F. O'Byrne),
and others to destroy the building while amassing a body
count. Noted Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen performs the
role of Jonas Skarssen, the CEO of the bank and thereby
the principal agent of arms sales to terrorists and rogue
countries—a fellow who intones the caveat that whether
he is killed or not, there are hundreds of bankers to
take his place to continue the nefarious activities.

In the world of The International,
bank patrons, are not interested in toasters for opening
accounts, they are more interested in establishing their
power, a power metaphorically illustrated by a series
of large, glass-enclosed structures that come across as
impenetrable. With architecture playing a major role,
The International jumps from scene to scene so
rapidly that the audience will be left with an overall
view of what occurs when the bankers work past three in
the afternoon, but will be frustrated in making sense
of the plethora of people, places and things that punctuate
the story's themes. Clive Owen as the tale's centerpiece
tries to cement the various pieces, a driven man with
a perpetual two-day beard.

It's may be a surprise to some that
single people in their thirties are still living with
their parents. Such living arrangements may be common
in other parts of the world, but in America, living with
your parents brands a youth as immature. At least now
they may have an excuse: it's the economy, stupid. But
the two principals in James Gray's film cannot legitimately
get away with such a claim. One is a disturbed man of
about thirty who shares a cramped apartment with his folks
in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, even working
for his dad in the family dry-cleaning establishment.
The other may not live with her parents, but she is set
up by her sugar-daddy in an apartment in the same building
- a kept woman. These two are not just immature: they're
screwed up.

Two Lovers is the story of
two screwed-up people—how they live their lives
as through they were still adolescents and how they "find"
each other the way people with the same character deficits
tend to find each other.

Two Lovers (loosely based
on a Dostoevsky story), will remind moviegoers of films
like Marty and European classics like
La Strada and Night of Cabiria . What's
surprising about this story is how astonishing this fairly-low-budget
film actually is. Graced with superlative casting, Two
Lovers rocks because everyone in the tale is so believable.
Joachim Phoenix, in particular, inhabits his role so closely
that we put aside our images of him in roles such as the
vengeance-crazed Ethan Learner of Reservation Road,
Johnny Cash in Walk the Line and Commodus in
Gladiator. In Two Lovers, Phoenix portrays a man who, despite his emotional disturbance, is
able to seduce two beautiful women.

Writer-director James Gray, whose 1994
film Odessa gives him the creds to make another
story located in Brighton Beach, tells a story of a guy
who turns his hostility inward. Joaquin Phoenix's character,
Leonard Kraditor, opens the movie by jumping from the
small bridge overlooking the neighborhood's Sheepshead
Bay. Having lost his fiancé on the brink of their
marriage because both tested positive for Tay-Sachs disease
(a genetic mutation which afflicts Eastern European Jews),
he has been sharing a roof with his Israeli-born dad,
Reuben (Moni Moshovnov) and mom, Ruth (Isabella Rossellini).
He meets Michael Cohen (Bob Ari), who is expected to buy
the family dry-cleaning business, and whose unmarried
daughter Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) has shown a romantic interest
in Leonard. But when Leonard meets Michelle Rausch (Gwyneth
Paltrow), a beautiful neighbor, he is smitten, determined
to compete with the woman's older married lover, Ronald
Blatt (Elias Koteas).

What's clear enough in this film is
that, despite the usual blindness that afflict those who
are in love, is that Michelle, however physically desirable
and perky, is erratic. Since Michelle is rich and "kept"
by a successful Manhattan lawyer, she is out of Leonard's
class. It is obvious to the audience that Leonard would
do better with Michelle, who comes from a similar, merchant
class, and who is so stable that she understands his problems
and even tells him that she can take care of him.

Two Lovers is old-fashioned
enough in its treatment of family ties that we in the
audience are eager to find out "what happens next."
The conclusion, happily, is not all that predictable,
leaving us to ponder just how well Leonard is going to
make out during the next few years or decades. Gwyneth
Paltrow seems not to age: she is as beautiful as she appeared
in 1995 as Patsy Jefferson in James Ivory's Jefferson
in Paris. Elias Koteas, in the role of the philandering
lawyer, turns in solid work as a fellow who is nothing
in the looks department but obviously has appeal (in addition
to his money) for his young girlfriend. But the big prize
goes to Joaquin Phoenix, whose emotions can be read at
any moment on his face and through his body language.
His portrayal of Leonard is intense and credible, telling
us a story of a man whose charisma pulls two young women
into his orbit despite—or perhaps because of—his
vulnerability.